Why martech teams will need diagnostic expertise in 2026

Most martech teams I spoke with this year admitted the same thing. They weren’t sure whether their stack was genuinely flawed or whether they never learned how to judge it. That uncertainty is the real source of friction. When people can’t distinguish between workable and harmful complexity, everything starts to blur. Features get duplicated, journeys half break without anyone noticing, and no one feels confident about what should stay or go.

I’ve described this slow drift into disorder as entropy. You don’t need to understand the technical definition to recognize the lived version, the moment when the stack feels heavier each quarter, not because the tech is getting worse, but because the team never got the support or space to build the literacy the system demands.

Which leads to the real hiring challenge for 2026. Martech stacks don’t need more execution capacity. They need people who can diagnose. People who can look at a stack and understand what’s valuable, what’s noise and what’s quietly draining the team’s energy. Without that capability, entropy — or plain ol’ stack decay — becomes the default state. With it, the stack becomes something the team can grow into rather than hide from.

The literacy gap that keeps teams from reading their stack

Leadership often assumes that martech maturity is a matter of budget or tooling. If the stack is underperforming, the reflex is to buy more features, add another platform or bring in a vendor demo that promises a cleaner and brighter future. But the real gap sits one layer above the stack. It sits in the team’s ability to read it.

Most teams I meet in my work as a contractor don’t know how to identify the early warning signs of a system that’s starting to wobble because no one taught them. The same is true for knowing the difference between healthy complexity, the kind that creates room for flexibility, and harmful complexity, the kind that multiplies cognitive load. Without that literacy, every platform feels simultaneously powerful and fragile.

When you hire in 2026, you need to hire for more than skills. You should also be hiring for budgeting training and for perception — for the ability to make sense of the environment the organization has built over the years. That sensemaking skill has become the real resource constraint.

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Why different martech problems look the same from the outside

One of the most misleading patterns in martech is that very different problems produce the same symptoms. A bad stack behaves a lot like an undertrained team. And both behave like an organization that has quietly accumulated more potential than it has the time or literacy to use.

From the outside, these situations — or symptoms, I should say — look identical: slow delivery, inconsistent journeys, unexplained failures, growing backlogs and a general feeling that the system is heavier than it should be. Sound familiar? What’s important to remember is that underneath, the root causes vary.

Sometimes the stack genuinely is flawed. I see it more often than I’d like to admit. Sometimes the team has never been taught to recognize harmful complexity. Frequently, the real issue is that the organization is sitting on underused capability that nobody has the capacity to explore. Not unused value in the vendor marketing sense, but unclaimed potential that could reduce workload, improve decision-making or streamline execution if the team had the space and support to experiment.

This is where the literacy gap becomes visible. When people can’t distinguish valuable complexity from destructive complexity, they also can’t see which parts of the stack could unlock growth. Underuse and misuse blur together, and everything feels like overhead.

The risk is that leadership responds with the wrong intervention. They might replace a stack that was fine, upskill a team that needed different tooling or invest in features the organization has no strategic use for. All because early warning signs, entropy and imbalance are indistinguishable without diagnostic capability.

Dig deeper: Is it time to clean out your martech stack?

Hiring people who can connect business goals to system behavior

Most teams are built around functional skill sets. Look around, and you’ll see data engineers, analysts, marketing ops specialists and channel owners. Each knows their part of the system deeply, which is commendable. But today’s stack doesn’t reward isolated depth. It rewards people who can move between layers like data, orchestration and execution, and translate intentions into system behavior.

This is where many organizations struggle. Data engineers may understand the pipelines better than anyone, but often have limited influence over marketing outcomes. Marketers may understand customer strategy, but lack visibility into the underlying architecture. The result is elegant machinery that runs smoothly but isn’t pointed toward the right destination.

Hiring in 2026 means looking for the connective tissue roles — the people who can read the system from both angles. They are the ones who can:

• Interpret what the stack is doing and why.
• Link technical decisions to commercial outcomes.
• See where underused features could meaningfully change workflow or efficiency.
• Explain system behavior in business language.

They are translators, and every high-performing martech team I’ve seen has at least one. Without them, organizations either overspend on tooling or undershoot on strategic value because no one is mediating between what the business wants and what the stack is capable of.

No one budgets for capability

Here’s the uncomfortable truth many don’t talk about. Most companies spend more on unused SaaS features than on training the people managing them. They invest in tooling, integrations, orchestration layers and AI add-ons, but when you ask about the budget for capability development, the answer is usually silence.

You can’t hire your way out of this gap unless the organization is willing to give people space to grow. Capability doesn’t come from job titles. It comes from repetition, reflection and the freedom to experiment without being punished for short-term loss of productivity.

And this is where the impostor feeling reappears. When organizations underinvest in literacy, staff end up blaming themselves for not understanding the tools. They carry the weight alone. The stack becomes a source of anxiety instead of a shared system of practice.

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Why 2026 teams need sharper capability, not more headcount

If the past decade was about scaling teams to match the stack, the next few years will be the opposite. Smaller teams with greater cognitive range outperform larger teams with fragmented roles. The winning pattern looks something like this:

• Fewer handoffs, more cross-functional fluency.
• Fewer tools but deeper literacy in each one.
• More time reserved for maintenance and review.
• Regular diagnostic cycles to clean up entropy.

Improve your corporate environment by building conditions where people can operate with enough mental space to notice what the system is doing.

The martech hiring challenge isn’t about finding people who can run campaigns faster or build segments quicker. Those skills matter, but they’re not what save a struggling stack.

The real question should be “who on your team can read the system?” Who can name the difference between feature bloat and genuine capability? Who can identify the early signs of entropy before your martech stack becomes a full operational drag? Who can raise the literacy of the entire team rather than becoming another single point of failure?

If companies hire for those capabilities, the stack becomes lighter, cleaner and easier to grow into. If they don’t, no tool, no matter how powerful, will save them from the slow decline into disorder.

Dig deeper: Why your martech still feels like a cost center — and how AI changes that

The decade of diagnostic talent begins

Bigger budgets or more advanced platforms won’t be the big change-maker in 2026. What will be is how well teams understand the systems they already have. The organizations that thrive will be the ones that invest in perception, interpretation and maintenance. The ones that see martech not as a collection of tools but as a living environment that needs care, teaching and time.

We’ve spent a decade hiring people to build. The next decade belongs to the people who know how to maintain, improve and diagnose — the people who can see the stack clearly enough to help others see it too.

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